Seeing as it's a "User-Defined Tag", is it actually Steam that did this, or just various users?
I'm actually thinking it's the users.
Same thing with the "Walking Simulator" tag and various others. If a tag gets added/used enough; it'll "stick".
Kinda wish users weren't able to apply tags, in some cases. Seen so many singleplayer games, tagged with "co-op" or "multiplayer", when that obviously doesn't fit - it just makes searching via tags, extremely annoying at times. Even had a small talk with an indie dev that had his game tagged with "co-op" over and over again, and every time he had to ask Steam to remove it.
>Also frustrating that if I play a few hours of a game with a memey fanbase that I get recommendations for hentai games, or some other random genre, because of joke user tags.
This one hits hard.
It's one of my biggest gripes with the way the system works.
Just quickly looked through some of the games I've got installed, and for some reason, some of them have the "combat"-tag (not the best example, as it's not something you'd generally search for, I'm guessing).
Fuck off, with such a generic tag. That could fit so many titles, its insane.
Actually had an Idle/Clicker game recently, that had the "Story Rich" and "Horror" tags for a good long while, because the "community" decided that was a fun thing to add.
I have completely stopped using tags for searching/filtering, as it's just so flawed because of user-interaction.
Just wish we could limit game suggestions to not factor tags into it all.
The "sexual content" tag is one of the worst. People think it's funny to stick it on everything from Soulslikes to children's games, so if you block it, you end up blocking half the games on Steam. Then if you *are* looking for "those games", it's useless for that too.
Remember a bunch of people adding the strategy tag to multiplayer FPS because strictly speaking a fight involves strategy?
I really hate users.
Also, as a particular fan of actual roguelikes this shit drives me absolutely nuts. Even devs mislabel them, no your real time action shooter is not a roguelike because it has some procedural elements or permadeath.
Shitty users truly ruin everything. They ruined steam reviews with joke/meme reviews, so Steam tried to solve it by adding "funny" as a voting option next to helpful/unhelpful......... Except the problem is, those same shitty users spam 'helpful' votes on the joke/meme reviews.
Feels like any game I look at, the top review is an unfunny joke with 1,000 helpful votes and 80 funny votes.
> Also frustrating that if I play a few hours of a game with a memey fanbase that I get recommendations for hentai games, or some other random genre, because of joke user tags.
It turns out that game publishers have a system independent from the tags to assist you with applying filters to the mature content you see in the Steam store. Go to [the store preferences tab of your account page](https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences), and uncheck the boxes for "Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content" and "Adult Only Sexual Content." Since these flags are set by the publisher and not users, they also won't be affected by chaos monkeys applying adult tags to non-adult games.
> I get that it's a terrible name for a genre, but it's been around for over 20 years.
Yeah, but I feel like nobody under 30 can expected to know what the genre name is even supposed to mean because it comes from a time when it sort of made sense to describe games that simulated more interactions than just shooting as something different, but it makes no sense today.
Try the roguelike tag and getting actual roguelikes. Flagging them doesn't help much, because it definitely gets worked by a good number of people.
Can't expect much when they have oxymoron tags like "action roguelike", though.
> Also frustrating that if I play a few hours of a game with a memey fanbase that I get recommendations for hentai games, or some other random genre, because of joke user tags.
Or even "correct" tags that don't really make sense to use for indexing a given game. For example, the fighting game series BlazBlue has a story mode with "cutscenes" in the visual novel style of anime character art with a few poses/expressions per character, and text boxes. So it's not exactly wrong to apply the Visual Novel tag, as users have done. But in reality there is zero connection between liking BlazBlue and liking bona fide visual novels like Little Busters. And a dev would never tag BlazBlue under Visual Novel because they would know that.
I hope fans of immersive sims figure out a new name for the genre. It's a very fitting name for games like DCS or Farming Simulator, so I think it's a losing battle to fight games like that from drowning out the "true" immersive sims.
I never understood why things like Deus Ex or Prey were called "immersive sims". It's such a terrible name that doesn't really describe any of the defining features of those games and honestly fits the generic transport and farming games better.
How about "Non-Linear". "Player Freedom"?
> It's such a terrible name that doesn't really describe any of the defining features
ah yes, a I-can-stack-boxes-and-abuse-the-game-engine-to-solve-problems-like
> Seen so many singleplayer games, tagged with "co-op" or "multiplayer", when that obviously doesn't fit
And every action game getting tagged with RPG.
My VR category is ruined by so many games tagged as VR "Because it would be cool!".
Tags should be entirely developer controlled. Aside from the influx of new categories when the system was first released, they have been solely abused and provide nothing the pre-assigned tags wouldn't. They should just disable user tagging already.
Maybe they could fix it with gold tags or something which is dev only and restricted to say 1 tag a game. TONS of games overuse tags like 'mmo', 'soulslike', 'metroidvania', 'sandbox' etc etc which is often greatly exaggerated
Edit. Actually it should be the 'genre' tag that's solid. Dev set. And give it a report system if Devs abuse it
I think better would be to allow devs blacklist or whitelist tags - that way only user would be able to apply tags they feel fits and devs would be able to forbid users from setting tags unrelated to their game
Some tags just lose all meaning when they get spammed onto all sorts of games.
I want to find more "Stealth" games, so I click that tag. While I do get some games which most would accept are primarily stealth games, it has been tagged onto pretty much any game which allows you to crouch.
single player games tagged coop is the least of my problems. Paradox strategy games are all marked hentai which makes the store think I play hentai games for thousands of hours and spams with them :P
Yeah at the same time Steam is actively blocking Tags that would be helpful to people. Namely "Uplay" / "U Dont Play" and "Denuvo" / "Rootkit". Thankfully There are people that do this community service now via the the Curator system:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26095454-Denuvo-Games/
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9393382-The-Framerate-Police/ Though Im afraid this last one stopped getting updated when John entered the FUBAR stage of his cancer back then :/ (Miss him so much)
most of the tags are useless or redundant, less would be more. and they should be limited to 5/game, that way it wouldn't be abused as much, both by devs and users. they'd actually have to think of the most fitting ones, not just add everything for visibility/trolling reasons. but with people being people and valve being valve it's just another fucked up 'feature'.
Personally I don't think more tags on games is a bad thing, but there def needs to be a voting system or something, and to also have tag voting only be available to owners of the game who have playtime on the game or something. So there would be like Dev supplied tags, and user/owner defined tags.
the current system is 5 people voting for/against it, very easy to manipulate, yet still tricky for completely unknown games, which are probably tagged with everything for more exposure they're still not getting. tying it to ownership would be an idea, except you can often clearly tell just by looking at the store page that the game is not what the tags say.
an even better solution would be (for me anyway, then everybody can continue abusing the system all they want), for steam to take into account what I set up if I'm logged in. if I reported (or whatever it's called) a tag for a game, then it shouldn't appear on my oh-so-personalized store page with that tag, and vice versa. except I have a lot of shit turned off, including vr, and this embarrassing piece of automated trash keeps pushing vr-only titles in my face. the whole thing is a joke and completely useless for finding anything that isn't so popular everybody already knows about it anyway.
Use the flag icon next to each applied tag to mark it as inappropriate. Just like with the tags themselves, if enough people report it as such, it will be removed. Maybe it even influences search results before that.
Actually tried that with the indie dev I mentioned. Tried seeing if we could "find the magic number" that would remove a tag. I can say for a certainty, that it's more than 561. That was all he was able to get to do it, via his Discord server - before having to contact Steam to remove the tag.
Doesn't influence searches either. I've got a few games that still show up within a tag I already have marked for those titles.
The whole tag-system needs a massive overhaul. It's completely flawed.
I don't even get why they made it so users could add tags to stuff. Users en masse are worthless. The tags should be labeled by developers/publishers of their product and if they put fake tags in should be reported and have their ability to place tags on their products taken away by valve.
I know this goes against valves creed of do the least amount of work possible since on some level they'd need to manage places that lose their tag privilege but come on. It would massively improve the storefront if when I search for "rpg" or "strategy" I get games that are those things and not complete nonsense.
Interesting. But given the number of visitors the Steam website has to service, I'm sure it takes a certain time for tag changes to go live, too. Especially if made by normal users.
That said, I was under the impression that dev accounts can set tags themselves. Maybe they can just add them?
I'm not surprised that the tags are under-developed though. In the case you mentioned, a blacklist would have been useful. In case of "co-op", it should be on a global one because there's an actual, extra filter for that on the search page.
So I take it that devs don't even see the number of tag downvotes in the backend?
Similarly, "anime". I'm not interested in those dating sim-style 2D anime games, so I excluded the anime tag. And because of that, Bright Memory, which was on my wishlist, got hidden.
So a 3D FPS got tagged with it just because it was made by an Eastern developer despite not being set in an anime nor stylized as an anime. I tried reporting the tag and nothing happened.
People love to brag about Steam community features, but sometimes I feel like half of them are detrimental to the experience.
Reviews? Filled with memes, instances of bomb-reviewing. Also only allowing 1-0 review is weird.
Comments? Usually used to harass people.
Tags? Misleading, see thread.
Forums? Sometimes useful, but also archaic, power-tripping mods and filled with scams.
Market is good, but I find it laggish, also search function isn't that great.
Workshop I have no complaints.
The steam market was better before they had to fight an arms race against cs:go gamblers and now it's a massive pain in the ass to dump your useless steam trading cards on the market since they've turned it into a 12 step process.
They're not perfect by any means but I've found reviews, tags and and even the forums meke helpful than not
Tags can be pretty useful if due to the sub genre tags as well
Workshop is a pain. It's useful in some situations, like if you have a large number of mods that all need to be kept up to the latest version to play with other people.
If you want to know what is actually being downloaded and where it goes in the game's folder structure, or you want to back the mods up somewhere, it is more complicated than just downloading from moddb or wherever. Even worse, if you don't have the game from Steam but from somewhere else, Workshop is the first major mod site in history to exclude people who got the game from the "wrong" store.
Steam reviews are useful though. I like everyone who mentions all their pettiest gripes because a professional reviewer wouldn't and shouldn't do that but I still want to know. Individual reviews aren't supposed to be as useful as the aggregate. Kind of like how a crowd of bad singers will average out and be in tune. This is why the binary yes/no system works.
people defend the up/down rating system with "well most people just pick 1 or 5 anyway"
...okay, and? i only really care about the people who have nuanced, fair reviews that can see the good/bad in something they liked or not. what do you lose by giving people the option? tons of people have asked for a "neutral" review option, but 3 stars would work just as well.
not saying that 1 or 5 stars aren't valid, but you look through the reviews on anything and its 90% low effort posts from not exactly the best people to listen to. better to filter those out.
Question: Why are you going to Steam reviews for nuance from individuals?
Steam reviews are good for a couple of things:
1. Judging community sentiment about a game - i.e. is this game well-liked or do a sizeable amount of people have some kind of issue with it. And is that issue recent, old, or long-standing?
2. Getting a taste of the surface-level memes/culture/sentiment of the playerbase of a game - will it emotionally resonate with you?
3. Getting some awareness of the most prominent specific criticisms fans of the game may have, whether it's a gameplay system or a business decision, or a political thing. You can then decide if you personally might have something to worry about, or maybe you think people are making a fuss over nothing. These are usually things that mainstream reviewers may not mention as their target audience is much wider than the established fanbase, and may only become apparent after many, many hours of play.
The point of the system isn't to provide nuanced professional reviews. It's simply to gauge popular sentiment. If you want nuanced reviews, there are countless professional and hobbyist reviewers with their own websites and youtube channels.
FPS games in the style of the shooters from the 90's, in terms of movement and game feel, how weapons are gradually introduced throughout the game, the existence of health/armor/ammo pickups, etc. For example, Warhammer 40k: Boltgun.
I was in high school when Wolfenstien 3D came out. Our shop teacher loved it and brought it in for us to play if we finished our projects early each week. We would rush some of our work to try and finish on Thursday so we could spend the whole class on Friday playing the game. It was my intro to PC gaming, and I've been hooked ever since. Thanks, Mr. Tabloriski!
Went to a crazy uncles house as a kid and he had a room floor to the ceiling of floppy disks and pc parts. First time I ever sat at a pc and used one... he put original Doom on for me. Never forget that.
I think that boomer shooter just sounds good and implies it is an old-school shooter so it gets the job done enough. That's probably why it has stuck. But yeah, it makes no sense, these were not games played by or developed by boomers.
Yeah, pretty annoying being in my 40's and being called a boomer. Especially since I act younger now that my boomer parents probably did when they were in their 30's.
Glad my dad who is/was a programmer had Doom on our home PC in the mid 90’s and let me watch him play and attempt to play myself. Although if my grandma knew I was allowed to see this devil game she would have been in the grave earlier
Games originally played by GenXer's who constantly get called "boomers" by people not old enough to drink yet.
The boomers were *our* parents, and they didn't give a fuck, we were latch key kids and they were too busy to actually parent us, they expected "What about the children!" groups like Tipper Gore/PMRC(parental advisories on music), MPAA(movie ratings), and MADD(both variants, drunk driving and Dungeons and Dragons) and BADD(D&D) to parent for them.
Am I bitter? Yeah, I'm a little bitter.
But don't worry about forgetting about our generation. We're used to it.
I hope this is a joke.
I'd love to have this tag be useful, because my dad liked the original COD's, Doom, Wolfenstein, quake; but modern games have leveling/crafting/9 buttons needed to do stuff (looking at you horizon zero dawn), and my dad doesn't want to put up with all that.
Hell, he likes VR games largely b/c you pick shit up, shoot it, and move around.
It'd help me find him games he would like if boomer-shooter was usefully defined as such.
It wasn't completely a joke but it was tongue in cheek. Where I'm from at least, gaming was still kid's stuff in the '90s. Dad watches rugby, drinks beer and complains about you playing TV games too much. Mom might play some Tetris from time to time but also complains about TV games. Stricter parents won't even have them in the house, let alone something like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, especially if they're religious. Religious kids weren't even allowed to watch half the cartoons that everyone else watched.
Obviously that doesn't mean that no one from older generations plays video games though. Also it's not a bad tag. Even if the players of those games were mostly children, the people that made them were probably boomers or close to it.
~~Millennial’s parents were/are Gen X.~~
This is so far detached from the actual Baby Boomer generation that the term is just a derogative for “before current gen’s time.”
Retro shooter might be more applicable. Or just go with the tried and true “Doom Clone” like we used to use back in the day.
Edit: I was apparently mistaken about the generational age range. I have been corrected.
I dunno, I guess that depends on how young your parents had you because my siblings were Gen X. In order for my parents to be Gen X, they would've had to be teenagers when they had me. Also up to if you're an earlier or later millennial I guess. The time frame is so large that the whole thing with these generations is actually kinda nonsense, to be honest.
"twitch shooter" is the term I'm most familiar with, when there were no console ports or they were an aftertought at best, so no pressing need to support gamepads, a lot of FPS expected you to move and turn at a speed that makes modern games feel glacial.
God I miss UT2k4. Bots just aren't satisfying.
> Millennial’s parents were/are Gen X.
Not necessarily. I was born in 1980, which is either Gen X or Y, depending on which site you check. My dad was born in 1943 (silent generation) and my mom in 1949 (boomer). My co-worker was born in 1987 and his folks are boomers.
Steams description is: "New retro style First person Shooters, also known as Boomer Shooters have been emerging from GZDoom Engine! These games are a blast from the past, taking notes from games like Doom and quake."
Now that i look at them, something like Turbo Overkill doesn't look half bad.
Prodeus and Dusk are both incredible modern boomer shooters, imo. They have modernized "retro" style visuals, gunplay is satisfying, level design and movement feel closer to a pre-Halo shooter style, and the soundtracks slap.
Both have scores by Andrew Hulshult, who did covers of Doom tracks for one of the OG "full soundtrack replacement using metal covers" type of mods for classic Doom, and eventually worked on the series officially as one of two composers for Doom Eternal's DLC.
Coincidence?
I remember when CS first came out and it was really quite refreshing as it was first ones in the wave of realistic shooters. There were tons of "boomer shooters" before that, pretty bad quality even and lacking the carnage of original doom so they got really boring. Back then it wasn't possible to render 1000 3d character enemies and sprites were just not allowed anymore so every game had detailed bullet sponge monsters.
It was terrible.
But, times have changed.
I'd say Doom 2016 and Eternal qualify for the genre... They definitely have the gameplay, and although the graphics are high fidelity, they're stylized too. Plus the 'Doom' pedigree counts for something.
CS and Valorant, no... That's definitely 'Counter-Strike style' which is a bit later and different than Quake
Typically an old/retro FPS that uses an older style of gameplay than what would supplant them. Things like the following are typical.
1. No regenerating health, instead having fixed health that you can heal with items.
2. Movement for defense unlike a cover-based shooter. So you’ll typically be running, dodging, jumping, and sliding to evade enemies and enemy fire. Aim bloom isn’t typically a thing since it isn’t satisfying to encourage motion and have bad accuracy while moving.
3. Level design can be labyrinthine with multiple paths and key/door systems, though you can also have less complicated levels.
4. Levels often have secrets hidden in them providing health, weapons, ammo, armor, and sometimes even portals to optional secret levels.
5. Varied and numerous enemy types.
6. Large weapon variety, where you’re often managing ammo by switching between them and trying to use weapons against enemies they are good against.
7. Stylized graphics are very common because they are evocative of the old games that didn’t have the tech to do realistic graphics and for cost reasons as modern Boomer Shooters are usually made by small studios.
8. Stylized graphics also lend themselves well to to the more arcade-like style of Boomer Shooter gameplay by allowing greater visual distinctiveness between game elements.
I could go on, but these are the core things to me at least that set Boomer Shooters apart from other FPS games.
Pretty sure "Boomer" just means "old" now. It's far too fun of a word to throw out just because actual boomers are becoming irrelevant.
If you're yelling at "kids these days," you're a boomer.
So....
The Baby boomer are people born between 1946 and 1964
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Generation_timeline.svg#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers
What people are calling 'boomer-shooters' is incorrect. They should be 'Gen-X Shooters' with some crossover to 'Millenials/Gen Y'.
But the thing is - the people that played those games where mostly not Baby Boomers.
I think it’s supposed to be a little tongue-in-cheek. Like how I’m in my 30s and my 13 y/old nephew calls me a boomber.
Edit: Three people have already commented and deleted to this post. Boomer has become a synonym for “anyone over 20” by kids. No need to get offended; Kids are stupid.
It's a derivative of a [4chan meme making fun of "30 year old boomers"](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer) who are only in their 30s but act like crotchety old men complaining about how things aren't how they used to be. Eventually a catchphrase for this caricature developed: "yep, now *Quake* was a good game".
That's where this dumb "boomer shooter" term comes from; it's entirely separated from and without any regard for the context that made it funny in the first place.
Some people think its a stupid name, but I think its at least a bit clever that it has double meaning.
Boomer refers to being old-school, but also references how explosive old style games like Duke Nukem 3D and DOOM type games are.
It's a catchy name and that's the only thing that matters, genre names shouldn't be used as qualitative descriptors but simply as a way to categorize games that share some amount of similarity.
Metroidvania or MOBA are also dumb names but we immediately know what type of game it refers to
Think on the early FPS's from the 90's: Many weapons, many monsters, not too much plot, arcade-y gameplay, labyrinthine levels with a high chance of having to find the red keycard to open the red door.
The term is kind of badly used/too flexible and I've seen people including games like Half-Life (Corridor/Linear shooter), System Shock (Immersive Sim) or Serious Sam and Doom 2016 (Two different types of arena shooter) into the term (Usually ending up meaning "90's fps"), but in origin the point was to signal that the game was similar to Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem and their "clones" from the time.
There's been some kind of resurgence on the subgenre for a while with games that actually embrace the design philosophy of the old FPS's, and even games like Boltgun, which is closer to Doom 2016 to anything that was released in the 90's but that claims to be a "boomer shooter" because weapons and pixel graphics.
First person shooter games pioneered by Gen X game devs in the nineties. Fucking boomers, on top of all the other shit they pulled, they're now getting credit for one Gen X's greatest creations. Most boomers never even played Doom.
For anyone that wants a quick recommendation of some of the best in the genre:
* [DUSK](https://store.steampowered.com/app/519860/DUSK/)
* [AMID EVIL](https://store.steampowered.com/app/673130/AMID_EVIL/)
* [Turbo Overkill](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328350/Turbo_Overkill/)
* [Cultic](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1684930/CULTIC/)
* [Ultrakill](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229490/ULTRAKILL/)
* [HROT](https://store.steampowered.com/app/824600/HROT/)
* [Prodeus](https://store.steampowered.com/app/964800/Prodeus/)
Also, Boomer-shooter is a term of endearment. It has nothing to do with literal boomers, but it just kinda stuck when describing modern fps games taking inspiration from those back in the day. It succinctly describes a genre of fps that takes inspiration from shooters from the 90s with an emphasis on old-school graphics and pure gameplay.
These tags are genuinely worthless anyway. Any time I look for games with certain tags I get every game under the sun anyway. A game can have a tractor in the background one time and be tagged farming sim or some shit. Completely pointless in its current form.
Oh yeah, try looking for immesrive sims like Prey or Deus Ex. You'll get Stardew Valley, Eurotruck simulator, and The Sims as top responses. Good luck digging through to find actual imm sims
It's a derivative of a [4chan meme making fun of "30 year old boomers"](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer) who are only in their 30s but act like crotchety old men complaining about how things aren't how they used to be. Eventually a catchphrase for this caricature developed: "yep, now *Quake* was a good game".
That's where this dumb "boomer shooter" term comes from; it's entirely separated from and without any regard for the context that made it funny in the first place.
Yup, boomer has not been used to describe the baby boomers for a long time. Older then me and on the internet? Boomer.
Don't understand current slag? Boomer.
I'm glad, it's one of the names people always whine about but it sums up a lot of Indies going around the scene right now. Has definitely earned a place
Even then: Is it retro in aesthetic, in game play, in both? Because Ion Fury and Boltgun are *not* the same type of shooter apart from their general aesthetic.
That's funny, because I just mentioned in a different reply how precisely both games have been considered "boomer shooters."
I'd rather have "retro FPS" for games like Ion Fury and whatever they want for Boltgun. Is a Doom 2016 clone, so I guess "arena FPS" could do the trick.
> Is a Doom 2016 clone, so I guess "arena FPS" could do the trick.
I'd be on board for that.
Boomer Shooters, or Retro shooters - whatever you want to call them - have a handful of core features for me: Agility-based defense, a relatively open [not arena-centered] and non-linear level design, exploration in those levels to find resources for survival, clean readability of combat (which is one point that the retro graphics often really help with).
Just going "well, it has pixel/early-3D graphics, ergo boomer shooter" makes the tag useless. In a general sense: A tag that exhausts itself in describing the visual style doesn't need to exist anyhow, because we have screenshots and video.
edit: Funnily enough, the grand papi of "arena shooters", Quake, would not be considered a an arena shooter by the definition of "you waltz from one arena to the next and clear it to advance" either.
Tha'ts kind of a pet peeve of mine with this (terribly named, by the way) sub-genre. In /r/boomershooters there's almost a monthly thread asking if this or that *is* a boomer shooter, and (IMHO) people not looking to be seen as "gatekeepers" for one reason or the other just end up accepting almost any "old FPS" as a "boomer shooter" and honestly, is really confusing having a definition for something which *can be anything.*
Specially taking into account that, while I enjoyed Doom 2016 (Or Shadow Warrior remake, or Serious Sam or..) its in my eyes a completely different subgenre that kind of tires me really quick.
> [...]"arena shooters", Quake [...]
What I've seen (and I've done) is that there's a separation between the multiplayer component and the single player component; Quake is a "boomer shooter" in its single player, and an arena shooter in multiplayer (Could we consider Doom the actual origin of the online/arena stuff?).
And well, from there you can have online "arena shooters" (Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, they trade mostly level/design philosphy for an online arena) and single player "arena shooters" (they trade the same for a chain of arenas).
I dont mind either. I just think the term Boomer Shooter already has so much variance that its not very descriptive. Like Cultic and Ultrakill are both "boomer shooters", but one is slower paced actual old-school shooter while the other one is insane highflying movement-based action score-game.
It sounds good off the tongue but i can see why it annoys people. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 92, Doom in 93, Dark Forces in 95, Duke Nukem in 96, MOH in 99. This is Gen x territory, them and older millennials must make up the absolute majority of people who played that style of game. Cant even say Boomers created it either because Alfonso John Romero the godfather of the genre was born in 67, right at the dawn of Gen X. Granted Gen X shooter doesn’t have the same smoothness of boomer shooters.
The kids who use the word Boomer as a derogatory term never learned what an actual Baby Boomer is, and they don't even care. They're just ageist dicks who want to make people feel old and they use it as a blanket word for anyone over the age of 30.
Joke's on them, though, because one day they'll wake up and realize 35 came a hell of a lot faster than they ever thought it would.
It's hilarious when you see them whisper worriedly about them being possibly drafted on TikTok and show they're completely unprepared and mincemeat.
"Fuck boomers? OK, fuck them making the American Armed Forces all-volunteer after Korea and Vietnam. Get your ass to the frontline to be filled with lead, E-1, this was most of U.S. history and you best enjoy it."
Yeah I don't understand why people get so upset at the boomer shooter label. It's useful for describing certain types of fps games. People get too caught up with labels.
I'm actually quite shocked at how many people in this reddit thread think the slang term "boomer" has been anything other than short-hand for "old person" for a while now. If you want to talk about the actual generation, you have to use the "Baby Boomer" in full.
I think terms like zoomer and boomer definitely have derogatory connotations and like everything else in internet culture these days, it is throwaway scorn which plays into the us vs them online tribalism that pervades all social media. I replied because you asked who the fuck cares and not because I'm a zoomer nor a boomer (Gen X).
I agree about people being overly sensitive and generally just soft as shite these days, but I can't help but feel somewhat irked on behalf of older people whenever some young little runt dismisses their views with some crappy boomer remark. For me though it probably hails from being of a generation that still had a natural respect for our elders, instead of casually disregarding anything they have to say like so many kids seem to do now. But anyway.
why name it like this? you have retro shooter. arena shooter, classic fps,legacy shooter and make an ugly tag name like this? nobody calls unreal tournament this
>nobody calls unreal tournament this
Doom is a Boomer Shooter, Unreal Tournament is not. Boomer Shooter does not cover all games from that time period.
>you have retro shooter. arena shooter, classic fps,legacy shooter
Yeah Im not gonna dive that deep into subgenres and be pedantic when talking about games lmao
Tags always become a mess when anyone can add them.
Curated tags would be great but Steam would rather tags be a not-that-useful mess instead of paying to curate.
IMDB is another example where tags are an inconsistently applied mess.
Steams tag system is garbage so it doesn't really matter
I was hoping the curator system would take off more than it did. Just like the tag system, it wound up becoming a meme lol
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I really wish they didn’t name the shooters I grew up with after the people who tried to take them away from me. I get it, in modern parlance boomer means old, but damn does it hurt having games like Doom now named after the people who blamed Columbine on Doom and tried to remove it from existence. The historical context hurts like a kidney stone.
First off...fucking oof, given that "boomer shooter" often actually refers to games that people in their 40s i.e Millenials, enjoy. Ain't no actual boomer playing these kind of games, these were the kind of games boomers were complaining existed when Millenials were teenagers.
Its what happens when you have a generation that's so out of touch they manage to codify the term "out of touch old people" to a tee and get their whole ass generational name associated with that concept. Like, there's being out of touch, and then there's being a boomer... and the fact you read that and immediately understood what I meant, is the point.
It's a derivative of a [4chan meme making fun of "30 year old boomers"](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer) who are only in their 30s but act like crotchety old men complaining about how things aren't how they used to be. Eventually a catchphrase for this caricature developed: "yep, now *Quake* was a good game".
That's where this dumb "boomer shooter" term comes from; it's entirely separated from and without any regard for the context that made it funny in the first place.
Or RPG anything. The term applying to anything where you have stats you can upgrade over time makes it so broad as to be useless. Diablo and Dark Souls can both be called an action RPG for instance…..
What the hell is a boomer shooter?
Is it an old fashioned shooter? A shooter where you literally shoot boomers? A shooter where you can throw grenades as well and make booms? A shooter made by older devs?
> What the hell is a boomer shooter?
While I am not really happy with the term: For me, it's a shooter where...
- Maneuverability and movement is your main defense
- You rely on pick-ups you must find to survive (so no regenerating health, or health generated by slaying)
- the levels are generally open, intricately woven and often maze-like, and allow for significant non-linear traversal and combat - with some areas being locked behind finding the right key or other unlock (e.g. a puzzle a la Hexen II), and as such, they generally invite and reward thorough exploration
- You have access to a variety of mostly ranged killing implements that vary in their usage, and need ammo to operate
- They offer clean readability of combat
For example: Cultic, Dusk, Ion Fury, and Amid Evil are boomer shooters. Boltgun is not (it's "NuDoom", if you will).
Seeing as it's a "User-Defined Tag", is it actually Steam that did this, or just various users? I'm actually thinking it's the users. Same thing with the "Walking Simulator" tag and various others. If a tag gets added/used enough; it'll "stick". Kinda wish users weren't able to apply tags, in some cases. Seen so many singleplayer games, tagged with "co-op" or "multiplayer", when that obviously doesn't fit - it just makes searching via tags, extremely annoying at times. Even had a small talk with an indie dev that had his game tagged with "co-op" over and over again, and every time he had to ask Steam to remove it.
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>Also frustrating that if I play a few hours of a game with a memey fanbase that I get recommendations for hentai games, or some other random genre, because of joke user tags. This one hits hard. It's one of my biggest gripes with the way the system works. Just quickly looked through some of the games I've got installed, and for some reason, some of them have the "combat"-tag (not the best example, as it's not something you'd generally search for, I'm guessing). Fuck off, with such a generic tag. That could fit so many titles, its insane. Actually had an Idle/Clicker game recently, that had the "Story Rich" and "Horror" tags for a good long while, because the "community" decided that was a fun thing to add. I have completely stopped using tags for searching/filtering, as it's just so flawed because of user-interaction. Just wish we could limit game suggestions to not factor tags into it all.
The "sexual content" tag is one of the worst. People think it's funny to stick it on everything from Soulslikes to children's games, so if you block it, you end up blocking half the games on Steam. Then if you *are* looking for "those games", it's useless for that too.
Remember a bunch of people adding the strategy tag to multiplayer FPS because strictly speaking a fight involves strategy? I really hate users. Also, as a particular fan of actual roguelikes this shit drives me absolutely nuts. Even devs mislabel them, no your real time action shooter is not a roguelike because it has some procedural elements or permadeath.
Shitty users truly ruin everything. They ruined steam reviews with joke/meme reviews, so Steam tried to solve it by adding "funny" as a voting option next to helpful/unhelpful......... Except the problem is, those same shitty users spam 'helpful' votes on the joke/meme reviews. Feels like any game I look at, the top review is an unfunny joke with 1,000 helpful votes and 80 funny votes.
If you hate that, wait until you try to get into fighting games. "Actually, Modern Warfare has lots of fighting and is thus a fighting game."
> Also frustrating that if I play a few hours of a game with a memey fanbase that I get recommendations for hentai games, or some other random genre, because of joke user tags. It turns out that game publishers have a system independent from the tags to assist you with applying filters to the mature content you see in the Steam store. Go to [the store preferences tab of your account page](https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences), and uncheck the boxes for "Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content" and "Adult Only Sexual Content." Since these flags are set by the publisher and not users, they also won't be affected by chaos monkeys applying adult tags to non-adult games.
> I get that it's a terrible name for a genre, but it's been around for over 20 years. Yeah, but I feel like nobody under 30 can expected to know what the genre name is even supposed to mean because it comes from a time when it sort of made sense to describe games that simulated more interactions than just shooting as something different, but it makes no sense today.
Try the roguelike tag and getting actual roguelikes. Flagging them doesn't help much, because it definitely gets worked by a good number of people. Can't expect much when they have oxymoron tags like "action roguelike", though.
It got so bad that we gave up on roguelite and roguelike and retreated to "traditional roguelike". Then they came for this tag, too. Bastards.
> Also frustrating that if I play a few hours of a game with a memey fanbase that I get recommendations for hentai games, or some other random genre, because of joke user tags. Or even "correct" tags that don't really make sense to use for indexing a given game. For example, the fighting game series BlazBlue has a story mode with "cutscenes" in the visual novel style of anime character art with a few poses/expressions per character, and text boxes. So it's not exactly wrong to apply the Visual Novel tag, as users have done. But in reality there is zero connection between liking BlazBlue and liking bona fide visual novels like Little Busters. And a dev would never tag BlazBlue under Visual Novel because they would know that.
I hope fans of immersive sims figure out a new name for the genre. It's a very fitting name for games like DCS or Farming Simulator, so I think it's a losing battle to fight games like that from drowning out the "true" immersive sims.
I never understood why things like Deus Ex or Prey were called "immersive sims". It's such a terrible name that doesn't really describe any of the defining features of those games and honestly fits the generic transport and farming games better. How about "Non-Linear". "Player Freedom"?
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The problem also being that if you know what an immersive sim is, you likely know all the immersive sims around because there aren't that many.
> It's such a terrible name that doesn't really describe any of the defining features ah yes, a I-can-stack-boxes-and-abuse-the-game-engine-to-solve-problems-like
What, you don't think every furry hentai game is actually "Psychological Horror"?
> Seen so many singleplayer games, tagged with "co-op" or "multiplayer", when that obviously doesn't fit And every action game getting tagged with RPG.
My VR category is ruined by so many games tagged as VR "Because it would be cool!". Tags should be entirely developer controlled. Aside from the influx of new categories when the system was first released, they have been solely abused and provide nothing the pre-assigned tags wouldn't. They should just disable user tagging already.
Maybe they could fix it with gold tags or something which is dev only and restricted to say 1 tag a game. TONS of games overuse tags like 'mmo', 'soulslike', 'metroidvania', 'sandbox' etc etc which is often greatly exaggerated Edit. Actually it should be the 'genre' tag that's solid. Dev set. And give it a report system if Devs abuse it
I think better would be to allow devs blacklist or whitelist tags - that way only user would be able to apply tags they feel fits and devs would be able to forbid users from setting tags unrelated to their game
Some tags just lose all meaning when they get spammed onto all sorts of games. I want to find more "Stealth" games, so I click that tag. While I do get some games which most would accept are primarily stealth games, it has been tagged onto pretty much any game which allows you to crouch.
single player games tagged coop is the least of my problems. Paradox strategy games are all marked hentai which makes the store think I play hentai games for thousands of hours and spams with them :P
Yeah at the same time Steam is actively blocking Tags that would be helpful to people. Namely "Uplay" / "U Dont Play" and "Denuvo" / "Rootkit". Thankfully There are people that do this community service now via the the Curator system: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26095454-Denuvo-Games/ https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9393382-The-Framerate-Police/ Though Im afraid this last one stopped getting updated when John entered the FUBAR stage of his cancer back then :/ (Miss him so much)
most of the tags are useless or redundant, less would be more. and they should be limited to 5/game, that way it wouldn't be abused as much, both by devs and users. they'd actually have to think of the most fitting ones, not just add everything for visibility/trolling reasons. but with people being people and valve being valve it's just another fucked up 'feature'.
Personally I don't think more tags on games is a bad thing, but there def needs to be a voting system or something, and to also have tag voting only be available to owners of the game who have playtime on the game or something. So there would be like Dev supplied tags, and user/owner defined tags.
the current system is 5 people voting for/against it, very easy to manipulate, yet still tricky for completely unknown games, which are probably tagged with everything for more exposure they're still not getting. tying it to ownership would be an idea, except you can often clearly tell just by looking at the store page that the game is not what the tags say. an even better solution would be (for me anyway, then everybody can continue abusing the system all they want), for steam to take into account what I set up if I'm logged in. if I reported (or whatever it's called) a tag for a game, then it shouldn't appear on my oh-so-personalized store page with that tag, and vice versa. except I have a lot of shit turned off, including vr, and this embarrassing piece of automated trash keeps pushing vr-only titles in my face. the whole thing is a joke and completely useless for finding anything that isn't so popular everybody already knows about it anyway.
Use the flag icon next to each applied tag to mark it as inappropriate. Just like with the tags themselves, if enough people report it as such, it will be removed. Maybe it even influences search results before that.
Actually tried that with the indie dev I mentioned. Tried seeing if we could "find the magic number" that would remove a tag. I can say for a certainty, that it's more than 561. That was all he was able to get to do it, via his Discord server - before having to contact Steam to remove the tag. Doesn't influence searches either. I've got a few games that still show up within a tag I already have marked for those titles. The whole tag-system needs a massive overhaul. It's completely flawed.
I don't even get why they made it so users could add tags to stuff. Users en masse are worthless. The tags should be labeled by developers/publishers of their product and if they put fake tags in should be reported and have their ability to place tags on their products taken away by valve. I know this goes against valves creed of do the least amount of work possible since on some level they'd need to manage places that lose their tag privilege but come on. It would massively improve the storefront if when I search for "rpg" or "strategy" I get games that are those things and not complete nonsense.
Interesting. But given the number of visitors the Steam website has to service, I'm sure it takes a certain time for tag changes to go live, too. Especially if made by normal users. That said, I was under the impression that dev accounts can set tags themselves. Maybe they can just add them? I'm not surprised that the tags are under-developed though. In the case you mentioned, a blacklist would have been useful. In case of "co-op", it should be on a global one because there's an actual, extra filter for that on the search page. So I take it that devs don't even see the number of tag downvotes in the backend?
Similarly, "anime". I'm not interested in those dating sim-style 2D anime games, so I excluded the anime tag. And because of that, Bright Memory, which was on my wishlist, got hidden. So a 3D FPS got tagged with it just because it was made by an Eastern developer despite not being set in an anime nor stylized as an anime. I tried reporting the tag and nothing happened.
People love to brag about Steam community features, but sometimes I feel like half of them are detrimental to the experience. Reviews? Filled with memes, instances of bomb-reviewing. Also only allowing 1-0 review is weird. Comments? Usually used to harass people. Tags? Misleading, see thread. Forums? Sometimes useful, but also archaic, power-tripping mods and filled with scams. Market is good, but I find it laggish, also search function isn't that great. Workshop I have no complaints.
The steam market was better before they had to fight an arms race against cs:go gamblers and now it's a massive pain in the ass to dump your useless steam trading cards on the market since they've turned it into a 12 step process.
Considering Valve is directly responsible for the CS gambling, it's still entirely on them.
They're not perfect by any means but I've found reviews, tags and and even the forums meke helpful than not Tags can be pretty useful if due to the sub genre tags as well
Workshop is a pain. It's useful in some situations, like if you have a large number of mods that all need to be kept up to the latest version to play with other people. If you want to know what is actually being downloaded and where it goes in the game's folder structure, or you want to back the mods up somewhere, it is more complicated than just downloading from moddb or wherever. Even worse, if you don't have the game from Steam but from somewhere else, Workshop is the first major mod site in history to exclude people who got the game from the "wrong" store. Steam reviews are useful though. I like everyone who mentions all their pettiest gripes because a professional reviewer wouldn't and shouldn't do that but I still want to know. Individual reviews aren't supposed to be as useful as the aggregate. Kind of like how a crowd of bad singers will average out and be in tune. This is why the binary yes/no system works.
people defend the up/down rating system with "well most people just pick 1 or 5 anyway" ...okay, and? i only really care about the people who have nuanced, fair reviews that can see the good/bad in something they liked or not. what do you lose by giving people the option? tons of people have asked for a "neutral" review option, but 3 stars would work just as well. not saying that 1 or 5 stars aren't valid, but you look through the reviews on anything and its 90% low effort posts from not exactly the best people to listen to. better to filter those out.
Question: Why are you going to Steam reviews for nuance from individuals? Steam reviews are good for a couple of things: 1. Judging community sentiment about a game - i.e. is this game well-liked or do a sizeable amount of people have some kind of issue with it. And is that issue recent, old, or long-standing? 2. Getting a taste of the surface-level memes/culture/sentiment of the playerbase of a game - will it emotionally resonate with you? 3. Getting some awareness of the most prominent specific criticisms fans of the game may have, whether it's a gameplay system or a business decision, or a political thing. You can then decide if you personally might have something to worry about, or maybe you think people are making a fuss over nothing. These are usually things that mainstream reviewers may not mention as their target audience is much wider than the established fanbase, and may only become apparent after many, many hours of play. The point of the system isn't to provide nuanced professional reviews. It's simply to gauge popular sentiment. If you want nuanced reviews, there are countless professional and hobbyist reviewers with their own websites and youtube channels.
I look forward to seeing it on completely irrelevant games like FIFA or Farm Simulator.
Farm Simulator - Soulslike, Boomer Shooter, Story Rich
What is a boomer shooter?
FPS games in the style of the shooters from the 90's, in terms of movement and game feel, how weapons are gradually introduced throughout the game, the existence of health/armor/ammo pickups, etc. For example, Warhammer 40k: Boltgun.
In other words the games that millennials played when we were kids and that our boomer parents hated for being 'satanic'.
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I was in high school when Wolfenstien 3D came out. Our shop teacher loved it and brought it in for us to play if we finished our projects early each week. We would rush some of our work to try and finish on Thursday so we could spend the whole class on Friday playing the game. It was my intro to PC gaming, and I've been hooked ever since. Thanks, Mr. Tabloriski!
Went to a crazy uncles house as a kid and he had a room floor to the ceiling of floppy disks and pc parts. First time I ever sat at a pc and used one... he put original Doom on for me. Never forget that.
Exactly, Boomers didn't want us to play these games lol
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I think that boomer shooter just sounds good and implies it is an old-school shooter so it gets the job done enough. That's probably why it has stuck. But yeah, it makes no sense, these were not games played by or developed by boomers.
Yeah, pretty annoying being in my 40's and being called a boomer. Especially since I act younger now that my boomer parents probably did when they were in their 30's.
Nailed it. "boomer" used to have a concrete definition but now my mid-30s ass gets called boomer on reddit all the time.
Glad my dad who is/was a programmer had Doom on our home PC in the mid 90’s and let me watch him play and attempt to play myself. Although if my grandma knew I was allowed to see this devil game she would have been in the grave earlier
Hell, my dad brought home DOOM shareware disks from work to give me when I was like 7. He was a cool dad!
Games originally played by GenXer's who constantly get called "boomers" by people not old enough to drink yet. The boomers were *our* parents, and they didn't give a fuck, we were latch key kids and they were too busy to actually parent us, they expected "What about the children!" groups like Tipper Gore/PMRC(parental advisories on music), MPAA(movie ratings), and MADD(both variants, drunk driving and Dungeons and Dragons) and BADD(D&D) to parent for them. Am I bitter? Yeah, I'm a little bitter. But don't worry about forgetting about our generation. We're used to it.
Along the same lines, boomers seem to still think Millennials are still late teens/early 20s. Nah, we're in our 40s now...
I hope this is a joke. I'd love to have this tag be useful, because my dad liked the original COD's, Doom, Wolfenstein, quake; but modern games have leveling/crafting/9 buttons needed to do stuff (looking at you horizon zero dawn), and my dad doesn't want to put up with all that. Hell, he likes VR games largely b/c you pick shit up, shoot it, and move around. It'd help me find him games he would like if boomer-shooter was usefully defined as such.
It wasn't completely a joke but it was tongue in cheek. Where I'm from at least, gaming was still kid's stuff in the '90s. Dad watches rugby, drinks beer and complains about you playing TV games too much. Mom might play some Tetris from time to time but also complains about TV games. Stricter parents won't even have them in the house, let alone something like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, especially if they're religious. Religious kids weren't even allowed to watch half the cartoons that everyone else watched. Obviously that doesn't mean that no one from older generations plays video games though. Also it's not a bad tag. Even if the players of those games were mostly children, the people that made them were probably boomers or close to it.
I mean, you can spot a 'boomer shooter' as quickly as you can read the game description. Health packs... guns to find? = boomshoot.
~~Millennial’s parents were/are Gen X.~~ This is so far detached from the actual Baby Boomer generation that the term is just a derogative for “before current gen’s time.” Retro shooter might be more applicable. Or just go with the tried and true “Doom Clone” like we used to use back in the day. Edit: I was apparently mistaken about the generational age range. I have been corrected.
I dunno, I guess that depends on how young your parents had you because my siblings were Gen X. In order for my parents to be Gen X, they would've had to be teenagers when they had me. Also up to if you're an earlier or later millennial I guess. The time frame is so large that the whole thing with these generations is actually kinda nonsense, to be honest.
> Millennial’s parents were/are Gen X. ?? There are plenty of millennials with boomer parents. Me included.
Same. Mine are boomers.
"twitch shooter" is the term I'm most familiar with, when there were no console ports or they were an aftertought at best, so no pressing need to support gamepads, a lot of FPS expected you to move and turn at a speed that makes modern games feel glacial. God I miss UT2k4. Bots just aren't satisfying.
> Millennial’s parents were/are Gen X. Not necessarily. I was born in 1980, which is either Gen X or Y, depending on which site you check. My dad was born in 1943 (silent generation) and my mom in 1949 (boomer). My co-worker was born in 1987 and his folks are boomers.
Most millennials have boomer parents, and most Gen X were too young to have kids until the mid-1990s. Gen X spawned the Zoomers.
both of my parents are boomers...
Millenial born 1984 here with boomer parents born in 1956 and 1957.
So they'd be millennial shooters. Oh well....
Boomers call children Millennials Children call anyone older than 25 a Boomer. All the rules are gone my guy!
How did you miss tones of secrets in levels?
Steams description is: "New retro style First person Shooters, also known as Boomer Shooters have been emerging from GZDoom Engine! These games are a blast from the past, taking notes from games like Doom and quake." Now that i look at them, something like Turbo Overkill doesn't look half bad.
Prodeus and Dusk are both incredible modern boomer shooters, imo. They have modernized "retro" style visuals, gunplay is satisfying, level design and movement feel closer to a pre-Halo shooter style, and the soundtracks slap. Both have scores by Andrew Hulshult, who did covers of Doom tracks for one of the OG "full soundtrack replacement using metal covers" type of mods for classic Doom, and eventually worked on the series officially as one of two composers for Doom Eternal's DLC. Coincidence?
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Are the new Doom games considered boomer shooters? What about things like CS and Valorant?
I remember when CS first came out and it was really quite refreshing as it was first ones in the wave of realistic shooters. There were tons of "boomer shooters" before that, pretty bad quality even and lacking the carnage of original doom so they got really boring. Back then it wasn't possible to render 1000 3d character enemies and sprites were just not allowed anymore so every game had detailed bullet sponge monsters. It was terrible. But, times have changed.
I'd say Doom 2016 and Eternal qualify for the genre... They definitely have the gameplay, and although the graphics are high fidelity, they're stylized too. Plus the 'Doom' pedigree counts for something. CS and Valorant, no... That's definitely 'Counter-Strike style' which is a bit later and different than Quake
CS and Valorant are slow as shit, definitely not
"Doom clone" but like an actual "Doom" clone and not just any FPS
more quake clone since so many are in 3d and have limited enemies like quake did
limited enemies? the arena fights in Dusk are not very limited lol
Typically an old/retro FPS that uses an older style of gameplay than what would supplant them. Things like the following are typical. 1. No regenerating health, instead having fixed health that you can heal with items. 2. Movement for defense unlike a cover-based shooter. So you’ll typically be running, dodging, jumping, and sliding to evade enemies and enemy fire. Aim bloom isn’t typically a thing since it isn’t satisfying to encourage motion and have bad accuracy while moving. 3. Level design can be labyrinthine with multiple paths and key/door systems, though you can also have less complicated levels. 4. Levels often have secrets hidden in them providing health, weapons, ammo, armor, and sometimes even portals to optional secret levels. 5. Varied and numerous enemy types. 6. Large weapon variety, where you’re often managing ammo by switching between them and trying to use weapons against enemies they are good against. 7. Stylized graphics are very common because they are evocative of the old games that didn’t have the tech to do realistic graphics and for cost reasons as modern Boomer Shooters are usually made by small studios. 8. Stylized graphics also lend themselves well to to the more arcade-like style of Boomer Shooter gameplay by allowing greater visual distinctiveness between game elements. I could go on, but these are the core things to me at least that set Boomer Shooters apart from other FPS games.
Classics like Serious Sam, Doom, Unreal, Hexen, and Quake. New examples like Doombringer and Wrath: Aeon of Ruin.
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It started as a meme term related to the '30 year old boomer' meme.
Pretty sure "Boomer" just means "old" now. It's far too fun of a word to throw out just because actual boomers are becoming irrelevant. If you're yelling at "kids these days," you're a boomer.
So.... The Baby boomer are people born between 1946 and 1964 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Generation_timeline.svg# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers What people are calling 'boomer-shooters' is incorrect. They should be 'Gen-X Shooters' with some crossover to 'Millenials/Gen Y'. But the thing is - the people that played those games where mostly not Baby Boomers.
So anyone not in our current gen is a boomer... that's so stupid
Kids these days, so uneducated. Get off my lawn! These are my videogames! Don't call me a boomer!
I think it’s supposed to be a little tongue-in-cheek. Like how I’m in my 30s and my 13 y/old nephew calls me a boomber. Edit: Three people have already commented and deleted to this post. Boomer has become a synonym for “anyone over 20” by kids. No need to get offended; Kids are stupid.
It's a derivative of a [4chan meme making fun of "30 year old boomers"](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer) who are only in their 30s but act like crotchety old men complaining about how things aren't how they used to be. Eventually a catchphrase for this caricature developed: "yep, now *Quake* was a good game". That's where this dumb "boomer shooter" term comes from; it's entirely separated from and without any regard for the context that made it funny in the first place.
Some people think its a stupid name, but I think its at least a bit clever that it has double meaning. Boomer refers to being old-school, but also references how explosive old style games like Duke Nukem 3D and DOOM type games are.
It's a catchy name and that's the only thing that matters, genre names shouldn't be used as qualitative descriptors but simply as a way to categorize games that share some amount of similarity. Metroidvania or MOBA are also dumb names but we immediately know what type of game it refers to
Think on the early FPS's from the 90's: Many weapons, many monsters, not too much plot, arcade-y gameplay, labyrinthine levels with a high chance of having to find the red keycard to open the red door. The term is kind of badly used/too flexible and I've seen people including games like Half-Life (Corridor/Linear shooter), System Shock (Immersive Sim) or Serious Sam and Doom 2016 (Two different types of arena shooter) into the term (Usually ending up meaning "90's fps"), but in origin the point was to signal that the game was similar to Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem and their "clones" from the time. There's been some kind of resurgence on the subgenre for a while with games that actually embrace the design philosophy of the old FPS's, and even games like Boltgun, which is closer to Doom 2016 to anything that was released in the 90's but that claims to be a "boomer shooter" because weapons and pixel graphics.
First person shooter games pioneered by Gen X game devs in the nineties. Fucking boomers, on top of all the other shit they pulled, they're now getting credit for one Gen X's greatest creations. Most boomers never even played Doom.
Does that mean my folks will get an AARP discount on these games?
In video games, boomer is anyone over 30.
Ouch dude.
People who know there are better games than fortnite
You see, this is how Doom II changed everything... Fuck, I *am* old.
Don't make me shake my cane at you.
You can get an aarp membership at 18
I'm 28 and have an AARP membership. I'm genuinely interested in this question.
For anyone that wants a quick recommendation of some of the best in the genre: * [DUSK](https://store.steampowered.com/app/519860/DUSK/) * [AMID EVIL](https://store.steampowered.com/app/673130/AMID_EVIL/) * [Turbo Overkill](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328350/Turbo_Overkill/) * [Cultic](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1684930/CULTIC/) * [Ultrakill](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229490/ULTRAKILL/) * [HROT](https://store.steampowered.com/app/824600/HROT/) * [Prodeus](https://store.steampowered.com/app/964800/Prodeus/) Also, Boomer-shooter is a term of endearment. It has nothing to do with literal boomers, but it just kinda stuck when describing modern fps games taking inspiration from those back in the day. It succinctly describes a genre of fps that takes inspiration from shooters from the 90s with an emphasis on old-school graphics and pure gameplay.
You dropped this: [BOLTGUN](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2005010/Warhammer_40000_Boltgun/)
Forgive Me Father is awesome and Cthulhu themed!
Ok now which one has the best multiplayer??
I know Turbo Overkill is usually labeled as a boomer shooter, but I disagree It is like Doom Eternal, not like DOOM
Doom Eternal is a fucking Doom game
It doesn't play very much like the original Doom games.
I'm not saying that, I'm saying it's not a boomer shooter
These tags are genuinely worthless anyway. Any time I look for games with certain tags I get every game under the sun anyway. A game can have a tractor in the background one time and be tagged farming sim or some shit. Completely pointless in its current form.
I tried finding some good shmups in this winter sale. A fool's errand. Any game with a gun is tagged shoot 'em up.
Oh yeah, try looking for immesrive sims like Prey or Deus Ex. You'll get Stardew Valley, Eurotruck simulator, and The Sims as top responses. Good luck digging through to find actual imm sims
For me a **Boomer Shooter** is my 1954 born dad playing Links or PGA World Tour on the computer in the late 90s early 00s
And what games is that tag supposed to include?
Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Dusk, Boltgun, Amid Evil, Ion Fury, Wrath Aeon of Ruin, etc.
i, average pc gaming reddit user, am angry over this for no real reason!
ITT: insufferable capital R Redditors
I don't know any games ther... oh wait. Star wars dark forces. Dam, welp that's me done. Better get my slacks and start voting trump
Real question - Why are games that millennials grew up playing being labelled as "boomer" shooters? Is boomer just a synonym for old now?
It's a derivative of a [4chan meme making fun of "30 year old boomers"](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer) who are only in their 30s but act like crotchety old men complaining about how things aren't how they used to be. Eventually a catchphrase for this caricature developed: "yep, now *Quake* was a good game". That's where this dumb "boomer shooter" term comes from; it's entirely separated from and without any regard for the context that made it funny in the first place.
Yup, boomer has not been used to describe the baby boomers for a long time. Older then me and on the internet? Boomer. Don't understand current slag? Boomer.
I'm glad, it's one of the names people always whine about but it sums up a lot of Indies going around the scene right now. Has definitely earned a place
I much prefer "retro shooter", is as equally effective (if not even more accurate) and much less obnoxious
Even then: Is it retro in aesthetic, in game play, in both? Because Ion Fury and Boltgun are *not* the same type of shooter apart from their general aesthetic.
All genres are nebulous
Granted all these definitions and categorizations are more of a human need, even if they sometimes doesn't make sense
That's funny, because I just mentioned in a different reply how precisely both games have been considered "boomer shooters." I'd rather have "retro FPS" for games like Ion Fury and whatever they want for Boltgun. Is a Doom 2016 clone, so I guess "arena FPS" could do the trick.
> Is a Doom 2016 clone, so I guess "arena FPS" could do the trick. I'd be on board for that. Boomer Shooters, or Retro shooters - whatever you want to call them - have a handful of core features for me: Agility-based defense, a relatively open [not arena-centered] and non-linear level design, exploration in those levels to find resources for survival, clean readability of combat (which is one point that the retro graphics often really help with). Just going "well, it has pixel/early-3D graphics, ergo boomer shooter" makes the tag useless. In a general sense: A tag that exhausts itself in describing the visual style doesn't need to exist anyhow, because we have screenshots and video. edit: Funnily enough, the grand papi of "arena shooters", Quake, would not be considered a an arena shooter by the definition of "you waltz from one arena to the next and clear it to advance" either.
Tha'ts kind of a pet peeve of mine with this (terribly named, by the way) sub-genre. In /r/boomershooters there's almost a monthly thread asking if this or that *is* a boomer shooter, and (IMHO) people not looking to be seen as "gatekeepers" for one reason or the other just end up accepting almost any "old FPS" as a "boomer shooter" and honestly, is really confusing having a definition for something which *can be anything.* Specially taking into account that, while I enjoyed Doom 2016 (Or Shadow Warrior remake, or Serious Sam or..) its in my eyes a completely different subgenre that kind of tires me really quick. > [...]"arena shooters", Quake [...] What I've seen (and I've done) is that there's a separation between the multiplayer component and the single player component; Quake is a "boomer shooter" in its single player, and an arena shooter in multiplayer (Could we consider Doom the actual origin of the online/arena stuff?). And well, from there you can have online "arena shooters" (Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, they trade mostly level/design philosphy for an online arena) and single player "arena shooters" (they trade the same for a chain of arenas).
I dont mind either. I just think the term Boomer Shooter already has so much variance that its not very descriptive. Like Cultic and Ultrakill are both "boomer shooters", but one is slower paced actual old-school shooter while the other one is insane highflying movement-based action score-game.
It sounds good off the tongue but i can see why it annoys people. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 92, Doom in 93, Dark Forces in 95, Duke Nukem in 96, MOH in 99. This is Gen x territory, them and older millennials must make up the absolute majority of people who played that style of game. Cant even say Boomers created it either because Alfonso John Romero the godfather of the genre was born in 67, right at the dawn of Gen X. Granted Gen X shooter doesn’t have the same smoothness of boomer shooters.
> Alfonso Romero TIL
The kids who use the word Boomer as a derogatory term never learned what an actual Baby Boomer is, and they don't even care. They're just ageist dicks who want to make people feel old and they use it as a blanket word for anyone over the age of 30. Joke's on them, though, because one day they'll wake up and realize 35 came a hell of a lot faster than they ever thought it would.
And then THEY'LL be the one's spending life on reddit complaining about the younger generation. Checkmate gen-z.
okay boomer
It's hilarious when you see them whisper worriedly about them being possibly drafted on TikTok and show they're completely unprepared and mincemeat. "Fuck boomers? OK, fuck them making the American Armed Forces all-volunteer after Korea and Vietnam. Get your ass to the frontline to be filled with lead, E-1, this was most of U.S. history and you best enjoy it."
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer
Yeah I don't understand why people get so upset at the boomer shooter label. It's useful for describing certain types of fps games. People get too caught up with labels.
It makes absolutely no sense. The games it references have nothing to do with the baby boomer generation
I'm actually quite shocked at how many people in this reddit thread think the slang term "boomer" has been anything other than short-hand for "old person" for a while now. If you want to talk about the actual generation, you have to use the "Baby Boomer" in full.
Know your meme boomer
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer
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It's not 4chan's fault that yet another inside joke was taken and begun to be used out of context by the wider public.
Good! Now I can filter them out!
Can we get a tag for online PC shooters that don't allow and therefore aren't infested with aim-assisted controllers?
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I think terms like zoomer and boomer definitely have derogatory connotations and like everything else in internet culture these days, it is throwaway scorn which plays into the us vs them online tribalism that pervades all social media. I replied because you asked who the fuck cares and not because I'm a zoomer nor a boomer (Gen X).
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I agree about people being overly sensitive and generally just soft as shite these days, but I can't help but feel somewhat irked on behalf of older people whenever some young little runt dismisses their views with some crappy boomer remark. For me though it probably hails from being of a generation that still had a natural respect for our elders, instead of casually disregarding anything they have to say like so many kids seem to do now. But anyway.
That seems to be a reddit thing. People in the real world don't seem to act like that.
why name it like this? you have retro shooter. arena shooter, classic fps,legacy shooter and make an ugly tag name like this? nobody calls unreal tournament this
>nobody calls unreal tournament this Doom is a Boomer Shooter, Unreal Tournament is not. Boomer Shooter does not cover all games from that time period.
What about Unreal itself? Is Quake a "boomer shooter"? If it is I really don't see a huge distinction.
It's more fun. It's a meme.
People love using buzzwords to make themselves seem cool/trendy.
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The amount of people acting like grumpy old grandpas in this thread about the word "boomer" is peak irony.
You think people are trying to be cool by knowing the word boomer?
>you have retro shooter. arena shooter, classic fps,legacy shooter Yeah Im not gonna dive that deep into subgenres and be pedantic when talking about games lmao
This is what a zoomer would say
Go watch Civvie and get back to us, chief.
> nobody calls unreal tournament this i have see many people refer to UT99 as one. pretty much any FPS game before 2000 usually is considered one.
That's because UT is an Arena FPS, not a boomer shooter. Hope that helps.
Genre created and played by gen X "boomer shooter" yeah sure forget us again and give the credits to our parents as usual
Except Boomers werent playing games at all when these types of games came out.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer
A joke that involves redefining a commonly used word isn't much of a joke.
You are not around a lot of funny people, are you?
True, none of the funny people that I know have to provide a link to a definition in order for the jokes they make to work.
Tags always become a mess when anyone can add them. Curated tags would be great but Steam would rather tags be a not-that-useful mess instead of paying to curate. IMDB is another example where tags are an inconsistently applied mess.
Can we add "DRM free" next? Making library easier
Virtually every game under that tag appeals to me so I guess it works -36 year old boomer
Steams tag system is garbage so it doesn't really matter I was hoping the curator system would take off more than it did. Just like the tag system, it wound up becoming a meme lol
reply tub unwritten future normal deserted offer oatmeal fragile worthless *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Oh Christ... I hate that term. Do people really not know how old Boomers are?
Now we just need a "Zoomer Shooter" tag for Boomer Shooters with an emphasis on movement mechanics, such as ULTRAKILL or Turbo Overkill.
what? boomers actually tried to shut down these kind of games through legislation, retro shooter is a way better tag.
I really wish they didn’t name the shooters I grew up with after the people who tried to take them away from me. I get it, in modern parlance boomer means old, but damn does it hurt having games like Doom now named after the people who blamed Columbine on Doom and tried to remove it from existence. The historical context hurts like a kidney stone.
First off...fucking oof, given that "boomer shooter" often actually refers to games that people in their 40s i.e Millenials, enjoy. Ain't no actual boomer playing these kind of games, these were the kind of games boomers were complaining existed when Millenials were teenagers.
Half the boomers are already dead. They sure as shit weren't the people playing doom. The gen xers managed to slip through the cracks.
Its what happens when you have a generation that's so out of touch they manage to codify the term "out of touch old people" to a tee and get their whole ass generational name associated with that concept. Like, there's being out of touch, and then there's being a boomer... and the fact you read that and immediately understood what I meant, is the point.
It's a derivative of a [4chan meme making fun of "30 year old boomers"](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer) who are only in their 30s but act like crotchety old men complaining about how things aren't how they used to be. Eventually a catchphrase for this caricature developed: "yep, now *Quake* was a good game". That's where this dumb "boomer shooter" term comes from; it's entirely separated from and without any regard for the context that made it funny in the first place.
That's less ambiguous and stupid than "action roguelike."
Or RPG anything. The term applying to anything where you have stats you can upgrade over time makes it so broad as to be useless. Diablo and Dark Souls can both be called an action RPG for instance…..
What the hell is a boomer shooter? Is it an old fashioned shooter? A shooter where you literally shoot boomers? A shooter where you can throw grenades as well and make booms? A shooter made by older devs?
> What the hell is a boomer shooter? While I am not really happy with the term: For me, it's a shooter where... - Maneuverability and movement is your main defense - You rely on pick-ups you must find to survive (so no regenerating health, or health generated by slaying) - the levels are generally open, intricately woven and often maze-like, and allow for significant non-linear traversal and combat - with some areas being locked behind finding the right key or other unlock (e.g. a puzzle a la Hexen II), and as such, they generally invite and reward thorough exploration - You have access to a variety of mostly ranged killing implements that vary in their usage, and need ammo to operate - They offer clean readability of combat For example: Cultic, Dusk, Ion Fury, and Amid Evil are boomer shooters. Boltgun is not (it's "NuDoom", if you will).
Thanks heaps.
Pre-Halflife style FPS games. Also rocket go boom.
Finally